Willing Davidson, Editor, Explorer

In the Times, Charles McGrath provides a detailed account of how our Willing Davidson, currently of the fiction department, formerly of the mail room, wrangled a two-hundred-and-eighty-three-page novel from the two-thousand-page manuscript of Henry Roth’s final work, “An American Type.” The job, McGrath reveals, did not merely involve excision: it involved imposing a structure on Roth’s fragments—Roth jumped from section to section as he wrote, leaving a disjointed mass. When Willing first got hold of the manuscript, he adapted two sections for publication in the magazine (“God the Novelist” and “Freight”). Then Roth’s estate asked him whether a novel might be fashioned. Willing didn’t know, but endeavored to “find out” by saying yes. “I never knew for sure. I only thought it would work when I was done.”

So how does Willing feel now that his bold journey into the unknown has come successfully to an end? Now that he is extremely famous? We interviewed him this morning: “It’s slightly odd to see a four-year mostly private project suddenly come alive in the Times. Weird but good. My only cavil is that the piece said I’m not prickly, which would be news to almost anyone who knows me. Privileged but prickly.”

As an entity which knows Willing well, the Book Bench can attest to the veracity of this statement.